1. Background
Since I fly the Tomcat with Jet Fighter of Velocity in 1989, I become a fighter simulator maniac until today. My favorite games are JetFighter 1 and 2, Chuck Yeager, USNF and FA. After fly FA for ten years, I want to make my dreams come true; there are my dreams as follows.
Fly F-35, F/A-18E/F on sky.
Fly with Jester in canyon terrian
Air refuel.
Landing a helicopter on a ship.
Fighters can attack cruise missiles by AI.
Ship can attack coming missiles by gun and missiles.
Close-In Weapon Systems (CIWS) can hit missiles.
Tomcat’s geometry wings can swap back fully.
In order to make my wishes com true, the first one could be done by shape editing quickly. Therefore, Fashion 0.1b (Fighter Anthology Shape Editor) is released at 12/20/2010.
This program is credited a lot of pioneers. John K. "Zephyr" Peterson built his site, FARC, thus I can find useful information in there. Robert Whitlock and Rich Caron, who write the preliminary guide of shapes, give me the first step. Hotfrog, who post ‘Shape (.SH) Files Format’, detail the shape file components. The Airbrush, 0.1 and 0.8, help me to understand the 3D framework of shapes. And CAG discusses with me via E-mail.
The motivation to build this tool wants to edit FA shape visually. All information can be observed in
https://sourceforge.net/projects/fash/, and in Zephyr forums. This tool is can be used free and improved, but please release your improvements back to FA community.
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2. What you need.
If you only want to use Fashion 0.1b to modify your own shapes, what you only need to install Google SketchUp software. It is free and can be downloaded from
http://sketchup.google.com/. With the use of a Ruby script and FASH tool, then you can start your shape editing.
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3. Setup of Fashion
The steps of Fashion setup are shown as follows.
1. Download Google SketchUp 8 and install it.
2. Put this file, shedit.rb, into the directory Plugins of SketchUp 8. For me, the path is C:\Program Files\Google\Google SketchUp 8\Plugins.
3. Create a directory, and put your shape files and fash.exe in this directory.
4. Download and install DosBox,
http://www.dosbox.com/,
5. Download and install Airbrush 0.8,
http://cid-e8983d73fd6eb5ce.skydrive.li ... /ab08b.zip, which is used to identify the target points.
6. Run Airbrush 0.8 with DosBox, and open the shape file you want edit. For example, if you want to open Y141.sh, the texture, _Y141.PIC has to be put together.
7. Now it is ready for Fashion setup.
We use an example to show shape modification process, change Y141 vertical tail wing to V-tail as F-35.
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4. Extract vertex points from shape.
The steps of extracting vertex points from shape are shown as follows.
1. Turn on command prompt, change to the directory which contains your shape files and fash.exe.
2. Type a command, ‘fash e Y141.SH’.
3. All vertex points will be extracted to a temp directory, tmp_Y141.SH.
4. These vertex points are presented by XYZ coordinates values.
5. Please do not change the vertex file names and directory name.
6. You are ready to see this shape visually.
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5. Edit vertex points with Google SketchUp
The steps of editing vertex points with Google SketchUp are shown as follows.
1. Turn on Google SketchUp.
2. Go to menu->Plugin-> Import sharp vertex 00.
3. Choose the first file in tmp_Y141.SH directory, VEX_Y141.SH_11_0_316_1159_.txt
4. You will see a point cloud, and it looks like a Yak 141. Use orbit (O key) to rotate this point cloud.
5. All points are presented by construct-point, you can select them (space key) and move (M key) them.
6. For example, I want to modify Y141 vertical tail wing to V-tail as F-35. What I should do is choose the top points of tail wing, and move them to right and left.
7. When you finish modification, go to menu->Plugin-> Export sharp vertex 00.
8. Terminate Google SketchUp, must do this, otherwise modification would not be saved correctly. Your modification would be saved to tmp_Y141.SH \VEX_Y141.SH_11_0_316_1159_.txt
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6. Rebuild shape by your modification
1. Turn on command prompt, change to the directory which contains your shape files and fash.exe.
2. Type a command, ‘fash b Y141.SH’, then Y141.SH is rebuilding.
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7. Test your modification
1. Put the rebuilt shape in to Airbrush, and open it. The V-tail should be seen.
2. Package it as a Lib, and test fly it.
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8. Something should be noting
1. The Fashion 0.1b tool is very beta, so users have to take the risk by them own.
2. The modified shape could lead to CTD. It seems related to the issue of visible angles. Help wants!
3. If you want to modify the sub-shapes, import them in vertex other, such as vertex 04, 05, and remember to export them.
4. Welcome any help, especially any information of polygon structures in Sh files. With the poly information, I can show shapes in SketchUp as AirBrush.
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Here is the binary download of Fashon 0.1b
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fash/files/Fashion%200.1b%20binary.rar/downloadHere is the source download of Fashon 0.1b
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fash/files/Fashion%200.1b%20source.rar/download
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